THE WOMAN DOSSER.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 15862, 27 February 1912, Page 4

THE WOMAN DOSSER.

(By PHILLIPS GIBBS, in the London “ Graphic.”)

“Single women only.” The letters are Written in black on a lamp that throws a flickering light on to the blank wall opposite, and makes shadow pictures there of the figures who slouch by, or stand under the shelter of the wall when the rain falls and the wind blows. I watched some of those shadows as Dante watched the people in his vision of Hell. A profile hideously distorted, but of human likeness, was outlined in black. It was a witch’s faco, with snakelike wisps of hair. It was flung upon the wall by a woman wrapped.in mgs, who gazed up at the lamp which invited single women like herself to a night’s lodging. Light rain was falling, and the wind was blowing it aslant, and the coldness of the night cut one to the bone. I halted, and took refuge in a dark doorway, and as I stood there single women shuffled by and disappeared beneath the lamp. They held tlioir heads down—heads strangely and horribly like mummies, whose dead flesh has been preserved three thousand years—and their skirts draggled in the mud. I heard the wheezy breath of some of them, and the chatter of their teeth, and one of them as she passed , WHIMPERED LIKE AN ANIMAL IN PAIN. In the street were slouching men, men with their heads bent also before the rain and the wind, clasping rags about them. It seemed as though this street .at night might be the meet-ing-place of scarecrows, bewitched into life. They took no notice of the women. No word of misery was exchanged as they passed. Into the doorway between one flickering lamp went the single men, and into another doorway lower down the street went the single women. Each one of them was a figure of dreadful loneliness in a great city of human souls. • Alone they had toiled in .the day, somehow anrl somewhere. Alone they had come for shelter and sleep. I followed the single women.' At the end of tile passage beyond the flickering lamp was a window marked “ Pay-office.” But no one answered when I rapped upon it, until there stood by my side, coming silently out of tho blackest shadows, a tall, gaunt woman, who peered at me suspiciously. “Do you want tho men’s lodginghouse?”

“ No; I have come to see this place.” The woman went to the head of a staircase leading down to an underground place. She called in a harsh, shrill voice, and presently another woman appeared and stared at me in the same suspicious way. After a few words she said, “ That’s all night. You can come down if you. like. There’s nothing funny to see.” Nb, there was nothing funny. I did not want to laugh when I went into that underground room where the single women who had come through tho streets of night were gathered together, before getting what they call “ sixpen’ovth of sleep. ’ It was A SIGHT THAT MIGHT BRING TEARS TO ANT EYES. For those were the homeless women of London—just a few of them— who, as every night comes, scrape six coppers together if they have Had any luck in the day—any luck, lucky people of life I—to hire a bed under the

roof of a common lodging-house. They were the women who have lost or failed to gam the thing that a woman’s soul craves, as the parched beast craves for waterbrooks, as, a lost ..soul craves for peace—a homo of her own. The man may be a wanderer, sleeping where he finds a kennel or a bush, and. yet preserve his manhood and his hope. Up and down the streets of adventure he may go, not cursing fatp because he is homeless. But to a woman some kind of home—however miserable, however small, in whatever place of ugliness or squalor—is necessary for her self-respect and her womanhood. A homeless woman has readied the last stago in her journey to despair. She has lost the last link that binds her to the great sisterhood of women. And hero in the underground room I stood among the homeless women. They were quarrelling. One of them stood up by one of the wooden tables, and in a harsh, cracked rciee tried out, “You are a liar!” She was a middle-aged woman with a pallid face, in which her eyes burnt like fires. “Liar yourself!” said another woman, with white hair straggling beneath a! crumpled black bonnet lolling sideways over her ear. Laughter rang out in the room, from several of these single women. There was an evil mirth in the sound of it. It was the laughter of creatures who mock at their own misery and. see the humour of their own damnation. Yet there were a few women here with kindly look, and patient, suffering, gentle faces. They had unwrapped some of their coverings, and some of them were bending, over tin mugs of cocoa and dipping bits of bread into the liquid, and MAKING A MEAL OF IT. “ Here, take a drop,” said one, pushing her mug over to a companion on the other side of the deal table. I had noticed that other woman. Her eyes had been fastened in a mesmeric way upon the cocoa and bread. Her underlip was trembling, and now and again she moistened it with her tongue. Hunger, sharp and glittering, stared out of those fixed eyes. But at the invitation, she drew back savagely and said What d’yer take mo forP “ Oh, if it’s like that,” said the other woman, drawing back her mug. “Didn’t know you wero prahd and ’aughty.” , ~ , For the most part they were elderly women, or well on to middle age. It was time for some of them to rest by the hearthsidc, while elder daughters were busy at the hearth. They wero old enough to be the mothers of sturdy sons, whose wages would keep a little home going. Alas! they were old enough to know all that life has to offer 'in the wav of misery, and of evil knowledge, and of hopelessness, to those whose homes belong to the memory of hotter days. Here and there was an eld woman, whose head shook palsied]y, out of whose blear eyes there dropped the weak tears of old ao-e, in whoso mouth there was not a single tooth to nibble at the crusts which they took out of scraps of dirty nespaper. But among these elderly women, muttering', quarrelling, ohucfchng. mumbling, coughing, wheezing and sneezing, altogether in a chorus, sat one young woman, SILENT AND MOTIONLESS. She was staring at the blank wall opposite, leaning forward a little as though gazing into a magic crystal where she could eee her fate. bhe naa a sullen look, as though fierce and dcsperato at the vision, yet there was a dark beauty round her face, with its black hair and brooding eyes and fuJ red lips. A Jewess, perhaps, called Ruth or Naomi, and brought up in a Jewish horns life, but now a homeless woman in a common lodging-house for “single women only.” I looked for a moment into her face of tragedy and then turned away.

The woman at my side was explaining that it was a bad time for the lodging-house. Many women can’t afford the sixpence. It is only the lucky ones with a bit of tvork to do who come here for the night. Yes. After all, these were the lucky ones. Their misery is not so miserable as that of those who sleep under the bridges before the policeman passes, and curl up in their rags in dark places between blank walls, or walk themselves lame until the daylight comes and the park gates open to them. There are degrees even in the homelessness of homeless women. In the dead of night, when the wives and mothors and daughters of men who still have a home of their own lie sleeping in their beds I have seen the wretched creatures creeping by. I have looked into their faces and shuddered at those ashen-grey masks of living women. I have seen the fierceness in their eyes, and heard the sharpness of the breath that cuts their lungs. It is a sight from which our gou! shrinks shuddering. For a homeless woman makes a man think of his own mother or of his own daughter, and then cry out against the cruelty of life, and be stricken with the fear of its tragedy.